I'm in much the same boat. I'm really, REALLY looking forward to seeing what DCS is going to be like in the DK2. I have high expectations but no illusions about the difficulty of seeing small, distant objects, and reading small text in the cockpit. I'm guessing zoom is not a great thing to be messing with while in the Rift, and I use it quite a bit even on a 2560x1440 monitor.

Um hello, these are people working in the GAME INDUSTRY, not exactly the pinnacle of stability is it? And we're talking about a once-great company that has served up crappy games for years now. I'm pretty sure it's not a huge shock to any of those employees that the company is missing payroll and probably toast. Sure, they have the right to be upset and gripe about it. But when it comes to making mortgage payments and stuff, that is 100% on the employee. Be a responsible adult and have some savings to fall back on, and find another job if you don't like how things are going at your current one.

This talk about how the company owners should sell their personal stuff to try to make payroll is stupid on so many levels. First, it's not sustainable. Second, a couple of Ferraris is probably a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what is needed to make payroll for hundreds of employees. Third, say they do loan the company their personal money, what exactly do you think that's going to accomplish? Do you really think the company just needs that little extra bit to squeak by and then things will be ok? No. A company does not recover from years of mismanagement that way.

Redmask wrote on Jun 16, 2014, 17:05:No one fucks with Google, they peer with everyone and their services platforms are too massive, I bet a huge chunk of Comcast related properties make money on Google services. The retaliation would fuck up even Comcasts world. Netflix was a prime target because they need edge CDN placement, Google doesn't need it and would laugh at Comcast slowing down their traffic, they could do much worse to them which would have major financial impact.

I had a Saitek X-45 and it did not age well. Replaced it with a Warthog for DCS back in 2012 and it's been well worth the high price. Great feel, tons of controls, solid hardware, I expect it to last a long time. Works great with Elite: Dangerous too. Of course, Star Citizen kinda sucks with it right now, but I expect that to be the same with any stick/HOTAS. They need to get their act together.

Hey, after all this time they finally released something, so I felt like sharing my first impressions. Were they overly critical? Yeah probably. That'll tend to happen here on Blue's News. Why is that? Well, we've all been around the block more than a few times. Our standards are shaped by the greatest games in history. WC2 is still my all-time favorite game.

Yes, I know it's an alpha and plays like it. I played the DOOM alpha where you ran around with a bayonet poking imps frozen in space, unable to harm them. Yet it was still utterly amazing. I've released alphas of my own. It takes guts to put something unfinished out there, even when circumstances force you to. They gave it the appropriate disclaimers. People are still going to judge and they know it.

Now, CR's stated goal, which he reminded us of in this AC announcement, is to make the "best damn space sim ever". Well that doesn't happen by accident, and it takes more than money. It takes vision, making the right design decisions, and executing them properly. This alpha is our first glimpse at seeing the results of those things. We really want to know. CR did it before. Can he do it again? Time and again we've seen legendary game developers from the nostalgic past attempt to achieve greatness one more time. We want them to succeed, sometimes ever so desperately. But usually they fail spectacularly, a la Richard Garriott. It's incredibly hard to achieve greatness and then do it again.

Anyway, since Elite: Dangerous is also attempting to be a great space sim, and it's pretty much the only other game in town at this point (LT doesn't really have the same aim and isn't playable yet anyway), the comparisons are inevitable. As I said before, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with both games. They both have tremendous potential, which is awesome after the utter drought of space sims we've endured.

Just spent an hour of actual flight time doing the Vanduul Swarm. Eh, it's ok. Has potential. Maybe more than I would've expected. As I played more and got a little better, it got better. Still, it's lightyears behind Elite: Dangerous.

Stuff that sucked about Arena Commander:

- It wants to use SLI but it's TOTALLY borked, had to force it off. (ED doesn't try and gets a little bit borked if you force it on.)

- Just getting out of the hangar and into AC is needlessly complex. There were two ships in my bay. I had to make sure to find and wear some helmet, then get into the correct ship (with the inexplicably blank control panels in the cockpit) before it would start AC. Ok fine.

- No TrackIR support. This is a HUGE WTF. They support Oculus Rift but not TrackIR? After playing ED with TrackIR it feels just astoundingly poor to fly without it. I go to turn my head and nothing happens. This is something that the game oughta be designed around, not something that gets tacked on years later. ED absolutely has the right idea with this and the end result will probably reflect it.

- It's hard to see stuff in space. The giant circles around the targets are really annoying. The field of view is small. The lighting is way off. Sense of scale is hard. Visual and auditory cues for movement nearly non-existent... meh. Lack of TrackIR support doesn't help with any of this either.

- Can't bind any controls, and the bindings for the Thrustmaster Warthog are borked. Nothing on the throttle works, and the actual controls on the stick don't match their instructions. At least the fire button worked, SORT OF. If you pull the trigger all the way, it changes the !@#$ing camera view. Just what you don't want when you're in the middle of firing at someone.

- Ship movement and aiming with a joystick kinda sucked. I had to constantly switch between decoupled and coupled modes. Coupled mode to get the ship moving in the right direction, and then decoupled mode to have any sort of shot at aiming well enough to hit anything... with gimballed lasers even. At least the aiming in the decoupled mode is pretty easy and very stable, unlike flight assist off in ED which spins all over the place unless you have mad l33t skillz yo, but you can get by just fine in ED without ever needing to disable flight assist. And the transition between modes is jarring and uncomfortable in AC, compared with silky smooth in ED.

- Ship HUD GUI is really non-intuitive. As a result I never really did much more than turn and shoot stuff with the default lasers. Everything in the ship HUD GUI in ED was obvious from the get-go except for choosing a faction.

- It didn't crash! Of course, ED has always been stable in its single player modes too.

- Damage model is pretty neat, although good luck figuring out WTF is going on when it comes to damage with either your ship or the enemy's. Maybe that will get better with experience but it was always blindingly obvious in ED.

Anyway yeah, that's pretty much it. Of course this is the very first release of SC (that isn't just a stupid hangar - that's hangar with an 'A' people) and ED has been iterating for a while now, plus ED has its problems too (fundamentally flawed netcode).

It'll be interesting to see how things evolve from here for both games.

Aero wrote on May 31, 2014, 19:57:What you can do is just download DCS World on Steam, which is free. It comes with the an Su-25 (sort of the Russian equivalent of an A-10), and this will let you check out the basics of the sim without having to pay for anything.

I do own FC3, but the only difference between FC3 and the other DCS stuff is that the aircraft aren't modelled to the same level of detail (can't work the buttons in the cockpit and so on).

They actually just added a free trainer version of the P-51D called the TF-51D. Basically a full P-51D minus the weapons, center fuel tank, and radios, but you get the full flight model and clickable cockpit. So now you can get the full DCS flight experience without paying a cent. Pretty awesome.

I'm not expecting much based on the video I saw that contrasted stealthy and violent approaches. Seemed like very shallow console stuff. I'd like to be wrong, though. I mean, I know the original Wolfie wasn't exactly a thinking man's game, but still.. something seemed troubling about this one.